To comply with WordPress.org rules, changes in the code and how the plugin was distributed had to be made. If your license starts with the “F-” or “I-” it is not compatible with the new versions of the plugin (and the new licensing system). The plugin now requires being bought through the new Meow Apps Store. This link:

Why? On WordPress.org, only the free plugin can be hosted, so it cannot be Pro anymore (I was forced to make this change, so you might have missed this message displayed in your WP which was part of the update). It is also a big change and investment for me, but WordPress.org is right, this is the way to go. This new store also comes with many features (keys, licenses, renewal, upgrades, cancellations, discounts, etc.).

For my existing users, to ease this upgrade, I made the price of my licenses cheaper or with more URLs.

If you have a Forever license (starting with “F-“)
If you got this license less than 160 days ago, reply to the welcome e-mail you received from Meow Apps (or use the contact form) with your previous license key and the e-mail you are using in Paypal. I will refund the previous payment. If it is more than 160 days, we are out of luck, but I will give you a 90% discount, and you can get any license your like.

If you have a Yearly license (starting with “I-“)
If you got this license less than 160 days ago, reply to the welcome e-mail you received from Meow Apps (or use the contact form) with your previous license key and the e-mail you are using in Paypal. I will refund the previous payment. If it is more than 160 days, we are out of luck, but I will give you a 50% discount, and you can get any license your like. Also, don’t forget to cancel your current subscription in Paypal (click here if you don’t know how to do this).

If you really want to continue using the previous version of the plugin that works with your old license, you can still get it here: old versions of the plugins.

Thanks a lot for your understanding. It is best for the future, and currently a lot of work for me. My plugins will switch to this new store one by one.

Big changes! WP/LR Sync has been perfectly stable for some time, so it was time to add a new feature in it: images ordering (within a collection / gallery). But the biggest change is that there is now a Meow Apps Store with a powerful licensing system. The rest of my plugins will also use it soon (and this is actually a requirement which has been asked to me by the WordPress team). By buying my plugins on the Meow Apps Store, you will be able to unregister websites from a license key, get invoices, manage your downloads, etc. So much more cleaner and less licensing issues.

What are the new licenses ?

There is basically two types. The main one is called simply “WP/LR Sync“. The license options are either Yearly or Lifetime. You will get all the following versions, like what you probably have with Adobe Cloud. The second one is “WP/LR Sync 3“, it is a forever license that doesn’t expire, but it is linked to that version.

Note that the little licenses are much cheaper than before, and now anybody running one website can currently get it for 9$ / year only. Get it quick, it is my recommendation 🙂

What about your current license

Are you using a former Forever?
Your license is linked to WP/LR Sync 2.x or WP/LR Sync 1.x. If you got it less than 120 days ago, just to get a new one (any of them) on https://store.meowapps.com. Then, contact me, with your previous license key (and preferably, the email you are using on Paypal), and I will refund you right away. If it is more than 140 days ago, I will provide you a 50% discount on the WP/LR Sync 3.0 license.

Are you using a Yearly?
If the last payment is more than 140 days ago, I cannot refund you (Paypal policy). So you would need to wait a few months, and get WP/LR Sync from the new store after that (or you can get it right away if you like). If it is less than 140 days ago, get a new one on https://store.meowapps.com. Then, contact me, with your previous license key (and preferably, the email you are using on Paypal), and I will refund you right away. Also don’t forget to cancel that previous subscription in your Paypal. With the new store, you will be able to control it directly from there (only for the new one, of course).

Your current license
Once it is refunded, the previous serial will stop working. Otherwise, it will continue to work, but my goal is of course to shut off the old licensing server.

Affiliation

If you are interested in becoming an affiliate and make some money selling my plugins, that is now possible. Create an account here: Meow Apps Affiliates.

Thank you!

I am working hard on making all this better. Handling thousands of customers, the support, the new features and all the other aspects is difficult but thanks to the support of many of you and your advices, I am able to find the best way to handle it all 🙂 So, big thanks for your kindness and for loving this plugin.

My best plugin became by far WP/LR Sync, not in a financial way (not at all, unfortunately) but in term of the number of themes and plugins working with it, the enthusiasm of my users, the fact it works perfectly, etc… I myself use it also every day and I am glad I made it this way. The next step is to make sure it works excellently with all the themes out there and the mobile apps are already on their way!

The blog of MeowApps is not very active, to be honest I prefer to spend time on making the plugins better and talk to you directly, but I think it would be also great if we could chat together (and talk about other plugins, it’s not like my plugins are the only interested ones). I opened the pages on my website for comments, and I also have created a little while ago a Facebook group called: WordPress for Photographers. Feel free to join and participate, ask questions.

Today, is a great day! WordPress 4.4 was released and it now creates by itself the src-set tag, including all your image sizes. That enabled the browser to load the most appropriate size for your browser device 🙂

Now, WordPress still doesn’t generate the Retina (high-dpi) images and WP Retina 2x will do its duty, as it always did. If you have the latest version of WP Retina 2x, it already adds the retina images directly in the src-set created by WordPress.

I recommend you to have a new look at the settings of WP Retina 2x. Thanks to WordPress 4.4, you optimize the retina process and make the whole solution really neat.

In Basics

Of course, keep the Auto Generate, you need your Retina Images. You also need to keep the Responsive part of WP 4.4 but you have this option to disable if you don’t like it (or have issues with it). I recommend to also disable the new “Medium Large” size that was added by 4.4, it’s not neat, it’s just an alternative size just in case. Since you are using WP Retina 2x, all the sizes are perfect, you don’t need this un-perfect size in the middle.

In Advanced

A new “Responsive Images” method has been added. This method simply adds the retina images in the src-set created by WP 4.4. When all the plugins and theme support WP 4.4 well, this method will be the most optimized one. Until then, keep on using the current recommended method, PictureFill. It does what the “Responsive Images” is doing but also rewrite the HTML for the older IMG tags to include the retina images.

If you have any questions, please ask below. Enjoy those new releases, towards a cleaner, faster WordPress 🙂

I am sorry the installation of the plugin is not smooth at all (rather, not working) from the Adobe Exchange directly. I have been chatting with Adobe Vetting since February in order to make it works but it never did. At this point, I don’t know what to do, I can only share my experience with you. If you want the plugin to be available, installable, and updatable from the Creative Cloud directly, I guess I will need your help. Feel free to drop them a message asking them to help me or LR developers in general.

The documentation for uploading a LR plugin to the Adobe Exchange is basically that: “To add a Lightroom Plugin package using the Online Packager, you must first zip the package, keeping your package’s internal folder structure intact. For example, “myplugin.lrplugin” becomes “myplugin.lrplugin.zip”. The Online Packager automatically unzips “.lrplugin.zip” files before adding them to the ZXP, providing a seamless installation experience for your users.”. This is from the http://www.adobeexchange.com/resources/7 page as of 2015, August 26 (and was the same months before that). I have always did this.

Since February I have been trying to submit my plugin since February. 6 months later, no success.

Adobe (May 6th)

Your product cannot be published because: The add-on seems to have installed via Extension Manager and is appearing under ‘others’ but we cannot find it on the computer. We have checked the Desktop, the Downloads folder (usually the default) and the Documents folder? Please check and resubmit, placing notes in the ‘notes to approver’ section if necessary.

Me (May 7th)

I just re-submitted the same file and the same folder. I took a screenshot for you as well
When I uploaded the zip, it automatically detected that it is a plugin for Lightroom, and also picked the correct folder for the Modules. It should work perfectly. I don’t know what happens to the server after I click on Submit but it seems something is not right. It the Install Location is not correct, then that should be changed on your side. From my perspective, they could be simplified such as “Modules folder”, “Documents folder”, etc.

Adobe (May 7th)

Jordy, now we receive an error saying the MXI file is invalid so Extension Manager will not install the file. Please can you tell us what type of file you are uploading and its file structure? i.e. if it is a ZIP what folders are inside the ZIP? Did you name the file to have an extension such as ‘.lrplugin’ as per the instructions?

Me (May 8th)

I am sending you the ZIP now so you can see what it is exactly by yourself. Basically it contains the folder called “wplr.lrplugin”. If the zip is simply unzip in the modules folder of LR, then the plugin should be recognized automatically.

The plugin is really simple, there aren’t any directories in it.

Please check the ZIP and tell me what you think. This is exactly the ZIP I am uploading to the online packager and it is actually automatically detected as a Lightroom plugin. If the ZIP was not well-made, I am pretty sure I would get an error directly. Something seems wrong on the online packager or an error message is missing, not sure.

Adobe (May 12nd)

Your folder looks correct. But from your earlier Screenshot, the ‘product’ says Photoshop, not Lightroom? Can you check that please as that would explain the MXI file error.

Me (May 12nd)

This says actually “Photoshop Lightroom” 😉 You can check, I included a better screenshot. You can see that “Lightroom” is following “Photoshop”. There is obviously a design/technical issue in the uploader/packer. How can we do it? Do you work with the developers?

Adobe (May 12nd)

Ok we have sent it to a different team to have a look at what the issue with online packager might be. We will report back to you as soon as we have some answer on that.

Me (May 12th)

No problem, I’ll wait for the answer. Thank you!

Adobe (May 21st)

Apologies, we are still waiting for an answer from the other team! We have chased it up today.

Me (May 21st)

No problem! Maybe they have found something and they are on it already 🙂

Adobe (June 1st)

One of our engineers started looking into this problem on Friday and is continuing to investigate it today. He will report back to us and we will pass on the information to yourself. Apologies for the delay on this. The team have been extremely busy of late.

Me (June 1st)

No problem, I’ll wait 🙂 But I am surprised nobody encountered this error for the whole time, it doesn’t seem that there are that many plugin developers for Lightroom yet (using the Exchange). I know a few developers but among them I am the only one using it.

Me (June 25th)

Still no news? Developers didn’t find anything yet?

Adobe (June 26th)

No dear oh dear we had some internal issues with CC 2015 release so we were all frantically working to sort that out but the engineers are so busy with internal requests that they probably don’t have capacity to assist with this query so please could you send us your entire product I.e. The files, the description text etc and we will just try to recreate the problem you are having and hopefully we can upload the add-on on your behalf?

Me (June 26th)

Alright, I send you a ZIP.

Me (July 10th)

Still having issues ? Can’t believe we started to work on that in February/March. I worked on a lot on this plugin you know, it’s a bit sad I cannot propose it to users easily, especially that a lot of users are looking for something like this.

Me (August 12nd)

You completely disappeared?

Me (August 24th)

(Since there is no response for them, I decide to try to upload the new version of the plugin as a new plugin for the Adobe Exchange from scratch – I have to try something)

Adobe (August 25th)

We see that you were able to submit 1 LR add-on successfully and it was approved? The format was perfect and installed without problems, so if you could replicate that with the second add-on – we should be good to go, yes?

(basically, the new version was ignored but somehow a patch I have uploaded from the past, maybe from April, got released – it is not the new version, and as before, you cannot install it automatically, I tried – and I get a ZXP if I try to download it from there)

Me (August 25th)

Unfortunately not. I have no idea how this got through but it is basically the old version. And it’s not auto-install, I just try to install it. The files didn’t go anywhere 🙁 FYI, I send you the zip I have uploaded and the screenshot of the online packager (which appears successful)

As in the documentation, I want to upload a ZIP containing my the plugin and that to become an auto-install on the Adobe Exchange. Seems like it works that way in theory. I send the plugin 3-4 times to Adobe Vetting for them to try. Still not working and I don’t think they ever tried my ZIP (but they agreed it looks fine).